Leto will win. Truth is that Academy owe Fassbender and it owe him baaad...:/ Hill was good but the same reasons the writer of this text wrote, Cooper is the weakest in the terms of performance itself. Abdi is newcomer so..

You suppose they "didn't like his performance enough". I just think this is a small movie with no big advertisement campaign and released a bit too early to become part of the "Oscar hype". Which means a big part of the voters probably haven't seen this movie, or haven't seen it as an Oscar contender, or have simply forgotten it, distracted by newer movies (the very short memory of the average Oscar voter is well-known).

My point is that IF that movie hadn't been overlooked, there would have been more focus on Daniel Brühl and he would have big chances to win.

You mean despite the fact that he got nominated at the Screen Actor's Guild Awards which has a lot of the same body of voters as the actors branch of the Academy? And also despite the fact that he got a high profile nomination at the Golden Globes, as did Rush for best film? The idea that it's little seen is nonsense, especially as all the Academy members would have received screeners of the film. Quite simply, not enough people in the actors branch liked the performance enough.

It's only my opinion but i think Daniel Brühl's snub has more to do with the overall snub towards the movie Rush, which probably wasn't considered worthy enough of Oscars. Despite all its nominations in other competitions, the ZERO nominations scored by Rush at the Oscars are kind of a proof of that. Oscar nominations tend to be "packages" including best picture, best director, best actors as well as some technical awards. So if a film is not judget worthy of getting an Oscar-package, it won't get anything - especially in the main categories.

That's not how it works, there's no such thing as a package nomination. In the nomination stage, individual Oscar categories are voted for by the branches that represent those categories. Actors only nominate for the acting categories. Cinematographers for cinematography. Directors for directing, and so on. The only category where the nominations are decided by the entire Academy is best picture. If a film is recognised in an acting category has got nothing to do with if it's recognised anywhere else. When a film shows up in multiple categories, all it shows is that the film has broad support among the many different branches. Bruhl was considered one of the six or seven frontrunners for a nomination, along with the five nominees and James Gandolfini. Bruhl has been nominated at some of the most high profile precursor awards, there's absolutely no way the acting branch were unaware of his performance, a lot of the acting branch would have watched his performance to be able to nominate it at the SAG awards. With the Oscars, each person has only one vote that can count. To be nominated, enough members have to put a person or film in their number one slot on their ballot. All it means is that the five nominated performances were given more number one slots than any other performance. Quite simply, the Academy didn't like any other performance as much as they liked those five.

But then I've got one question left: how do you explain that so few movies are considered in this broad range of categories? In almost all categories we see the very same movies. If a movie has a great screenplay and great performances, doesn't mean it has to be nominated for best make-up or best cinematography or editing, and yet most of the time it is. There are a lot of average movie that have outstanding music or cinematography, but yet they are nowhere in the nominations (by the exception of best visual effects, because most of the time Oscar-movies aren't loaded with FX). So I think the voters of all categories are heavily influenced by their global appreciation of the movie, and are not judging their particular category. This is why I used the term "Oscar-package", by the way.

Editing is tied to picture in the same way director is. You can trace back through the history of the Oscars and see how few films managed to win best picture without either a directing or editing nomination. That's just linked, so you'll see very few editing nominees that didn't make the higher categories. Performance heavy films also do well with best picture, because the actors are the largest branch of the Academy and are naturally going to be biased towards films that display their craft more heavily. But as for the other categories, take a look at some of this years nominations.

The music branch voted for films like The Book Thief, Despicable Me 2, Frozen, the Mandela film, Saving Mr. Banks, none of which appeared heavily in the major nominations.

The sound categories included the likes of All Is Lost, Lone Survivor, The Hobbit and Inside Llewyn Davis, which again, didn't appear in the non-techs.

Cinematography had Prisoners, The Grandmaster and Llewyn Davis

Make up has Bad Grandpa and Lone Ranger

And you can also get films that can score in the majors and not really appear in the techs. Her is a best picture nominee with only music and production design nominations in the techs, Philomena has nothing at all outside the majors except for best score. It's just that the films that get the best picture nominations usually have support from a lot of the branches and that's what gets them to best picture nominations in the first place.

You make a fair point, thanks for opening my eyes. It is true that this year's Oscars nominations are more spread out than a few years ago, when I used to be pissed off year after year.

But actually I'm still pissed off because of that Daniel Brühl snub. When I saw Rush in the cinema, I was blown away by his performance, more than any other performance this year, this explains why i'm so angry about that.